To Wait For Thunder
by muffers-person
Summary: He didn’t think it’d be hard: take on the approaching army, capture one guy and interrogate him, and use the information to find a way back home. He didn’t know how horribly wrong he could be. Bleach/Warriors Orochi/?


So I can't keep my hands out of a crossover's pocket for more than three seconds. This one hit me while I was playing Dynasty Warriors 6. Enjoy. Updates shall be somewhat regular, since it's being written for some workmates of mine.

**Disclaimer:**

**_Any opinions or viewpoints that are used herein are directly from the contributing author and do not represent the philosophy or viewpoints of the company or organization to which the published information belongs to. Orochi Warriors is a video game developed by Koei and Omega Force; all copyrights belong to them. Bleach is a manga series developed and written by Tite Kubo; all copyrights belong to him._**

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The gate to his cell kicked open with a bang.

He jerked his head up and his body moved with him on instinct, shifting his weight from the soft padding of his ass to the balls of his feet as the soldiers entering the cell drew their weapons. They caught his dark glare and exchanged smirks, inhumane laughter rumbling up from their throats as their swords' movements caught in the firelight from the above torches and flashed their steel at his eyes.

"Get up, boy," their head member grunted, gesturing at him with sword threateningly in hand. The sheen of scales glittered from the back of that hand, catching the torchlight the same way the swords had in another unwelcome reminder of the differences between this place and home. "The Lord wants to see you." The voice served no lesser a reminder either, rasping up from a larynx mutated by the same serpentine characteristic imbued into the rest of the body; it hissed through teeth curved down into the cavern of the mouth, fanged and venomous, the latter especially through the words it spoke.

He gritted his teeth, biting down on the urge to let the discontent and rage that had broiled inside of him for the past seven or so hours vent out through his voice. But he knew he stood no chance against them right now—not chained up like this, wrists shackled together and his ankles the same way, the chains of both secured to a black iron ring embedded deep into the floor of his cell. And he knew snarling at them would do nothing but serve to invoke their wrath; he'd seen proof enough of that when another prisoner had been pushed by their abuse enough to try the same thing.

He glanced toward her fallen body. She hadn't moved once since they'd left her, beaten up and bleeding from places under her clothes he couldn't even see. But he remembered the way they'd thrown her down, the force of their brutality and her sharp cries as they'd ravaged her both outside and in, and the violent, disparaging movements of the shadows playing out on the opposite wall of his cell as he'd forced himself to turn the other cheek.

Back home, he would have saved her; in fact, the guilt in his heart for not doing a thing to help her made him sick. But for some reason, he hadn't been able to move himself to help her here; hell, he hadn't even been able to look at them as they'd swarmed her cell. They'd jeered at him for it and even struck the bars dividing their cells with their weapons in mockery of his cowardice as they'd converged on her like a pack of beasts on their kill.

He couldn't make himself believe he'd succumbed to such cowardice. A feeling had to have stopped him from moving to her aid—a terrible feeling, but one that he knew had been there. The cold flash, the ice that had gripped his heart and breath in an instant and left his body rigid, his chest struggling for air, justified to him the fact that he hadn't even tried to go to her rescue for the sudden dread that a fate worse than death waited for him if he dared.

The taste of something dry and hot scorched the back of his mouth: disgust first, swiftly followed by shame. No; no, he could have helped somehow: he could have distracted them, tried to redirect their furies onto himself, tried to do anything at all to get their attentions off of her and spare her from their violence.

But he hadn't; he'd been too scared of the consequences to. And that fact in itself made him sick to his stomach.

This place and the creatures in it had sucked the fighting spirit right out of him, and he absolutely hated it. If they left him alone, he could humor the idea of an escape for a couple seconds; he could harbor a fleeting desire to fight back and regain his sword from them and with it his freedom, and then with any luck, the knowledge on how to get back home. But the instant those creatures came within sight of him, the second those inhuman eyes of theirs locked with his own, that fighting spirit drowned in a rush of dread.

And he couldn't fight it off. When those creatures were around, he could do nothing; he could only obey. And obey he did.

He pushed himself up from his crouch, his fingers cold and listless as they lifted from the floor, the heavy chain links dragging his wrists down and making it a struggle to pull up his arms. The weight of their stares bore down on him with a heavy pressure so familiar to the auras of the enemies back home that it made his heart ache with longing. And the creatures only watched him with those smirks twisted in barbaric delight as he fought for the resolve to stand, willing his limbs to break free from the hopelessness that gripped them.

As he straightened before his jailors, he could imagine the sight he presented them with: he, a teenage boy only sixteen years old, chained body sculpted with the obvious toning of a warrior's training, but leeched of the spirit and resolve to live up to the image—defeated in both a physical and mental sense, and nothing more than a victim to their ridicule. A flicker of his old defiance ignited in him briefly, hating his weakness and hating them for the unknown power they wielded that leeched him of the will to fight back. But it only lingered for a second before the despair drowned it out, leaving him to step reluctantly forward, the chains hanging from his shackled wrists and the ones trailing from his ankles rattling faintly as his movement dragged them across the stone.

The group of them seemed pleased by his acquiescence and even more by his silence, keeping unexpectedly quiet themselves as he approached, though he expected that to be a natural reaction to the potential threat of any prisoner, even one so subdued and caught in self-loathing as he. Their swords flashed at him again, the light provoked by the blades' movements as their wielders shifted stance only enough to be at their guard and ready to strike, prepared to cut him down if he dared try anything as stupid as fight back.

Another step, shaky with the strain of his reluctance to close the distance between himself and them, and his chains took on a transformation that only worsened his despair. They hummed and warmed against his flesh, and trembled with a sudden, single pulse of energy that travelled from the base of their ring to the very last links of their length before the cuffs that clasped around his ankles and wrists. He glared back over his shoulder at them, both repulsed and depressed by the sight of the chains unfurling themselves as an unseen power seized them and gave them movement.

They slithered free from the ring and slinked their way across the stone towards him, their ends looping together and merging into a single form. The metal links melted and the metal itself transformed further, bubbling as though heated from within by an unknown fire until its shape stretched and swelled into the image he had come to see all too often in this place: a snake, or at least the head of it, mouth parted and fangs bared with its body forming itself out of the four lengths of chain that held his wrists and ankles prisoner.

The head turned and hissed at him, and he felt the reciprocating gesture tremble up the chain lengths from its tail and into his body and felt what seemed like even more of his spiritual energy sucked away. He gritted his teeth, forcing down the feeble and fleeting urge to retaliate, and stepped forward again to follow his chains as his newfound jailer slithered forward, leading him toward the group of serpent-men who waited for him to pass through.

The terrible, suffocating despair of this place—he hated it so. Caught in its vice, he felt stripped of the will to survive or even exist at all, only pushing each foot forward with the intent to repeat the process with its brother limb, a mindless act befitting of the state of hopeless stagnancy that consumed him now. He could feel their stares on him as he passed, their loathing and malice spitting from eyes as bared with hate as their fangs, and he heard their sniggering hisses as loud as though they had screamed them in his ear.

"He's not so tough now, is he?"

"Tch. He's no more than a dog."

His teeth gritted together in sudden self-hatred. Where had his courage gone? Had it stayed back in his memories before this place? Back when his sword had still been his and his mind and body had been his own and not so consumed by this parasitic despair? Back then—how many days had it been since then?—he knew he had wanted to stand up to them, to fight and overcome them and persevere in this strange world so that he could find his way back home.

But where was that spirit now? He had nothing but this sickening depression left. He had no sword to fight with, and no will to stand up or reclaim his freedom from this unknown enemy. He had no more resolve—just misery and the vice it had on his limbs and mind, forcing his head under the surface of a lethargy that sapped from him all but the instinctive reaction to walk as the chains pulled him forward. And that's all he did—walk forward, one foot ahead of the other, head hung and eyes downcast and nothing in his expression but a cloudy disgust toward his situation, and toward himself for being weak enough to permit it.

They led him beyond the prisoners' quarters, down the passages and through the tunnels that connected his jailing chamber (only one of many) to the rest of the chambers throughout the dungeon these creatures kept them all in. The pathways and turns numbered so many that his head couldn't keep track of them all—not that his mind could keep track of anything but his depression, anyway—and he knew without a guard or guide with existing knowledge of the dungeon's layout that he could never hope to navigate them himself.

As they approached the end of one such passageway, he could see the glow of firelight at its end and hear the inaudible murmuring of voices. He forced himself not to hesitate at the sound, to falter or let any of his sudden insecurities toward that chamber surface in either his step or his face, because he knew if he did he would be humiliated for it without mercy. The half-snake, half-man hybrids that guarded them all hated their human prisoners, and told them all so as often as they could. But even their hatred paled in comparison to that of their Lord's.

The second his foot passed the threshold of the passage into the chamber, he could sense the mighty creature's eyes on him. The chamber fell silent at his arrival; only the sounds of his footsteps, bare feet shuffling against the stone, filled the suddenly still and suffocating air. He forced himself to swallow hard, his mouth dry and his face hot with growing unease as the snake-men and his guard chain led him forward through the threshold, out of the safety of the passage's shadow. The chains tightened around his wrists and ankles as he found himself instinctively resisting with each successive step he took, the metal pressing closer and harder into his skin as his progress grew slower, his movements strained and almost in loathing of what they approached.

In front of him, a woman's laughter greeted his entrance.

He stopped at the sound, tensing as the echo hit him like the points of a thousand needles of ice. And he couldn't fight it off; though he tried to use everything in his power to resist, the chilling numbness and withdrawal from himself swept through him like a wave. He could not force himself to move forward, or to step back or do anything but fall victim to the drowsy stasis her laughter's echo imposed upon him.

"You seem ill, human boy."

Her voice trembled with a crueler echo, caught on unseen eddies of her magic and hidden in the shadows of the chamber's high ceiling and pillars that loomed in circular array around its edge. He had to force his suddenly tired eyes to rise enough to look ahead of him, to see the threads of her magic weaving themselves into the silhouette of her form. Her pale, lilac-toned skin shone softly in the firelight from the torches set high-up in the surrounding pillars, and her mischievous eyes glinted brightly as they caught that same light, flashing him a hint of malice at the same time as her disdain.

Da Ji, the renowned and unspeakably cruel strategist herself, second in status and power to only the Lord and no other. She had been the one to openly admit to him when he had first arrived at being the perpetrator responsible for his capture—and back then, even with his sword and full use of his power, she had been the one that had brought him down before even ten seconds of their so-called battle had passed.

The gold embroidery of her arm-length red gauntlets and thigh-high boots caught the light as she took her form, their glitter standing out against the rich violet that colored the other scarce garments she wore to clothe herself. The other prisoners had whispered to him the rumors that she had once been a concubine, and her attire told as such: a brassiere, deep violet in color, with a steep neckline that closed only inches above her belly button, and then fanned out once more just above it to wrap tightly around her upper body; bare hips, and only a very immodest thong covering the area between her legs; fine silk scarves draped around the crook of both her arms, and several that fell from the back of the gold-embroidered material of her thong, to which the translucent, plum-colored material of her stockings clasped.

The corners of her lips turned up in a slight sneer to expose her tiny fangs as she caught him staring. She leaned forward, almost in the pretense to bow to him, but he heard her lilting laughter as she herself vanished into it with a whisper of magic to reform again no more than foot from his body. He felt his expression tighten in immediate disgust and tried to hide it; too fast for him, she lifted her finger in a swift, delicate movement beneath his chin, forcing his head up again and keeping it there with her power.

"How long has it been?"

Her voice sounded soft and gentle, and by no means faithful to the terrifying cruelty he knew it could take. The threads of her magic caressed his skin, guiding a slow, teasing touch down the front of his throat to taunt his weakness. He wanted to slap away her hand, but couldn't do it; she overwhelmed his body's ability to move by her aura alone.

After he didn't answer, her sneer only deepened. Her finger slowly dropped from beneath his chin, and with it faded the presence of her magic—a chance for him to let out a gasp of air he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"Two days? Or three?"

"Three," he whispered, throat hot and dry; the word came out so hoarse it barely sounded to him like a word at all.

Her sneer turned feral, fully exposing the set of her tiny but serrated white teeth—so like a human's, but too sharpened and thin to be such. "Yes," she repeated with a purr, obviously pleased by both the sound of his response and the response itself. He glared back at her, too numbed and sluggish by her magic to retaliate, but hating every second that she stared at him and enjoyed the sight of the suffering she'd caused.

"_For three days."_

Her voice had spoken somewhere above him, sometime after her magic had felled him in a single blow; even his fading senses at the time had felt the sting of its heartlessness. His sword had seemed cold and empty to his fingers in his slipping perception—hell, he'd been so weak at the time he'd barely been able to hang onto it to begin with—and all he'd been able to focus on in those last few seconds had been the damage to his blade instead of the words her voice had spoken.

But she had to have given an order to the guards to starve him. After the first day back his cell, after he'd woken up and went the first ten or so hours without a single bowl of water or rice, he knew she'd told the guards to withhold his food and water. He understood the tactic: a starved and dehydrated prisoner would yield to demands and questions more easily than a healthy prisoner.

And she had had questions for him back then; questions that she intended to get answers for now, apparently.

"And how do you feel, boy?" she inquired through her smile, her face and body aglow with the subdued, but foreboding hum of her magic before him. That magic hovered about her like a mist, enveloping her in an unseen cloud of spiritual energy that let her hover just centimeters off the ground, weightless and physically unburdened by what she had called the ugliness of human motion. "More talkative, I hope?"

He only glared at her back, expression tight with the strain of composing his facial emotions. The intensity of his mood swings over the last few days had distracted him from a lot of it, but even he had limits to what he could suffer from food and water deprivation—and even if he hadn't, his body definitely had. The removal of his food had made him irritable and moodier than normal, but the shortage of water had hit him far harder. His mouth felt hot and dry, and lethargy had already started to set in even before those guards had come for him.

But he still couldn't … he couldn't give out that information to her. If he had failed at everything else since coming to this world, he at least had to keep _them_ safe from her.

"Answer me, human," she said, her voice even softer than before; as it got quieter it got deadlier, and he felt his breath struggle in his throat in the returning vice of his despair at the unspoken threat in it. The whole of the chamber's attentions rested on him; he could feel their stares, hear their admirations about the guile of their mistress, and hear their scorn and spitting remarks about his weakness and futile resistance to the question they all knew she would ask.

"Human …"

He couldn't ….

"… Where are your friends?"

"_Kurosaki, go!"_

"_But—"_

"_Go! We have to scatter or they'll surround us! Just go! We'll be all right!"_

So he had. He'd left them by themselves while he took off in the opposite direction back on that mountain path, hoping to act as a distraction to prevent the approaching forces from sighting his friends. He had doubled back against his friends' wishes while they had run the other direction, fleeing in the assumption that he would follow close behind.

To that end, yeah, he'd betrayed them; he'd betrayed their trust. But back then, he'd thought his betrayal would at least count for something. He hadn't expected to come face to face with that woman leading whole battalions of those snake-like demons against him, and never had he expected to suffer so swiftly or easily under the force of her power. What she had wielded against him that night had hit him too fast for him to see, and too hard for him to recover from once it'd struck.

He only remembered the sound it had made—the thrumming, hollow vibrations of an unseen force amassing a terrible power—and after that, he remembered nothing at all. He only knew that he had woken days later on the floor of his holding cell with chains encircling his ankles and his wrists, and his heart and rationality both in violent flux. And that his sword had been taken from him sometime during the blackness.

His expression tightened in disgust. As if he'd ever lead some monstrous bitch with a power like that to the people important to him.

"I don't know where they are," he whispered finally. "… … And even if I did …" here his dry words turned harsh with scorn "… do you really think I'd tell you?"

Da Ji's silence lasted only a second—one fleeting second where his breath threatened to falter as his tension deepened in spite of his short-lived defiance—but then she started to laugh. The sound made him stiffen, and raised the hairs on the back of his neck as the echoes of it thundered in his eardrums; and not just his eardrums, either—the entire chamber trembled with the reverberations.

"I thought as much, boy," she said happily, throwing him a vicious, darkened little smile that flashed off her pointy teeth. "You definitely play the part of a broken hero, but I see that light deep down inside. You want to protect them, save them—make sure that the big, bad monsters that got you don't get them too, right?" Her amusement visually deepened at the disgust that must have clouded over his face. "You humans … you're all the same: predictable, and just _too_ heroic."

Her violet eyes flashed mischievously at him as she raised her hand, silver rings glinting in the torchlight. The magic hovered around her converged at the tips of her outstretched fingers, and then shattered within the same second it had gathered; and left in its place stood the body of a young woman, visibly half-conscious and struggling to retain the equilibrium to stand. He stiffened completely, forgetting to blink or breathe or do anything but stare stupidly at her in shock—shock which swiftly turned to anger as he recognized her clothes; or more specifically, the blood stains on them.

The girl from the cell beside him.

"As a hero, you must have that _oh-so-human _complex to protect," said Da Ji softly; the delight in her own actions dripped from her voice like venom, stinging and sickening to his ears. The woman shivered slightly as Da Ji raised her hand a little higher, obviously controlling the other woman's body with magic and forcing it to straighten up in mimicry of her hand's motion. "And here I have something which will very soon be needing protecting."

Her bottom lip curled slightly in a cruel sneer. "So tell me again, boy: where are your friends?"

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**TBC.**


End file.
